


Black Dog of Deep Space

by wherewolf



Category: British Folklore & Mythology
Genre: Gen, IN SPACE, third person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 04:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16469186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wherewolf/pseuds/wherewolf
Summary: Jack was halfway to sleeping in his cockpit when he heard the growling.





	Black Dog of Deep Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Irusu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irusu/gifts).



Jack was halfway to sleeping in his cockpit when he heard the growling. 

He wasn’t sure that was what it was, not at first. All he knew was that every hair on the back of his neck rose up at once, and then a second later he heard a deep rasping noise that trickled into his ears and straight down into his guts. 

“What the hell,” he said, scrambling for every control and instrument on the dash. Normal, normal, normal – everything normal. Nothing wrong with his ship. But still he heard that growl, something that vibrated his bones more eerily than any screech of metal on metal had in his thirty-odd years soloing deep space runs. 

He checked the computer to see if it had picked up on any noise from outside, but beyond the hum of distant stars, there was nothing, as was to be expected. He wasn’t on the most beaten flight path in the entire galaxy, but he’d downloaded plenty of records from other ships that’d passed along this path years or decades before, and every reading matched up to historical records. 

But still, he heard it. 

Jack shrugged his gloves off long enough to dig his fingers into his own ears, like maybe they were the malfunction. Nope. Or maybe they were and scraping around the insides of them with his own dirty fingernails wasn’t exactly a cure. Either way, Jack was so awake he felt like his heart wanted to trot out on its own, and he was at least twenty hours out from the nearest way station. For his own peace of mind, he decided to check the engines. 

In a little sloop like the T16-R there was room to pilot and room to sleep, and that was about it. Being an enterprising fellow, Jack had taken out the little built-in mattress in the back, filled that area with boxes, and set himself up as a delivery person, semi-honest and everything. If his chair was good enough to pilot in, it was good enough to sleep in, too. But that meant that instead of shoving the mattress up into the wall to get to the engines, he had to shove aside about half a dozen boxes, each filled to the brim with – well, he hadn’t asked, but it was heavy, whatever it was. And there wasn't exactly an empty space to shove them into. He mostly ended up shoving them on top of each other.

When he got them and the little latch-door to the engines out of the way, he shuffled into the claustrophobic space, crawling his hands forward enough that even with his legs and back hanging out into the cabin of the ship, he was surrounded on three sides by healthy whirring too damn loud to hear anything else over. Jack did a quick visual inspection of the pistons and rods, glanced quickly at the coil and converter like he’d have time to do more than scream once if either blew, but mostly he just felt himself relax, inch by inch. He felt fine down here. Maybe a little silly. So he’d imagined a weird noise after two weeks alone in space – like he’d never done that before.

Then he felt the paw on his back. 

He scrambled out of the engines so fast he was lucky he didn’t break anything on the way out, whirling around the second he was clear. Nothing. The ship wasn’t big enough for anything to hide in, and he was surrounded by nothing but boxes. But he knew what he’d felt. Jack’d kept dogs, back when he was young and planetbound, and the feeling of a big animal putting its paw and weight on you was unmistakable. He hadn’t imagined _that_. 

…the growling was back. But this time it felt pointed. Like it was emanating from somewhere.

Jack grit his teeth and didn’t look back at the engines. 

He hadn’t shut the latch-door. He’d been too startled to, and now in the back of his mind there was a little voice reminding himself that he’d left a nice empty space behind that any kind of monster could have filled since he’d turned his back. He didn’t listen to it. Jack was the kind of superstitious that believed other people’s stories, not his own, and he knew there wasn’t a damn monster in the damn engines. 

The growling was getting louder. 

Jack made himself climb back into his pilot’s chair. There was no way he was getting a wink of sleep until he made it to that way station, but he had something like ten thousand hours of compilation videos downloaded, and there was even a chance that a few of them were new to him. He could keep himself from going nuts until the way station was in hailing range, and then maybe he could request a nice doctor to teleprescribe him something strong enough to knock him out before he even landed. It was always nice landing somewhere new and immediately finding a way not to have to experience any of it. 

He scrolled through his collection mindlessly and had nearly decided on an audio drama when he made the mistake of looking up. 

There on the other side of the window was a big hulking shape, black against black, only discernible from the way it blocked out the stars. Its hunched shoulders were thick with muscle and shaking like it was about to lunge. Its eyes glowed, wide as saucers and bright enough to illuminate its pulled-back lips and snarling mouth. Its teeth were a dirty gray, trembling in its mouth with the force of its growls. 

Jack hadn’t felt himself stand, but he was stumbling back before he even knew it – and he immediately tripped on a box. 

He cursed as he fell, twisting around on his hands and knees to flail around uselessly for a stick or knife to defend himself with. But he didn’t carry a fucking stick into space, where the only thing he was supposed to have to worry about was catastrophic engine failure, not aliens or black dogs that could live in the vacuum of space. So instead he kept scrambling and tripping over more boxes, all the way until he’d scrambled into the engines, folded himself up smaller than he’d known he could, and shut himself in. 

The engines seemed quieter, or maybe his heart pounding in his ears just drowned them out. Either or both drowned out the growling, and though the space was so small that Jack’s knees were crammed up against the latch-door, he didn’t feel anything pressing up against it from the other side. The dog, whatever it was, wasn’t following him in. At least, not yet. 

People traded a lot of stories out in space, stuck together in little three-person crews or as the only two humans rattling around the same echoing way station at the same time. Jack had heard all of them, the outdated distress calls that led would-be rescuers to their own doom, the friendly stowaway on a used ship who turned out to be what killed its previous owner, the noises that shouldn’t be able to travel the vacuum that nevertheless drove people mad. Omens of death, malicious spirits, unexplained phenomena – if it was in space and might kill him, someone had told Jack about it.

But the only person who’d told him about space dogs had been his old partner back when he’d dabbled in small-time smuggling, the kind of stuff that wasn’t really worth it to anyone with a brain and so got left to people with only half of one. “Back before space flight was safe, when it was something people trained for, they’d send dogs first,” she’d told him once, when they were stuck in orbit around a planet that actually took the time to check their fake papers before letting them through. “A couple of the dogs came back, but a lot of them died. Especially in the really early days, when they were just figuring out how to do short hops in the same galaxy without taking ten years, a lot of the time they’d shoot a dog out in a little ship just to check if the acceleration would melt something living, and it would just – keep flying, forever.” 

Jack’d always had the mental picture of a little white and brown dog, nervy but trusting, and felt kind of bad for it. Maybe his mental picture had been off. Maybe those dogs resented being shot off into nowhere, left to starve or freeze or boil into nothing but angry, feral spirit. 

Still nothing pounded on the latch-door, and still he couldn’t hear any more growling. 

Or maybe two weeks was too long for a solo hop, and Jack needed to go back to having a partner for anything that would take him into deep space for ten days or longer.

Jack unlatched the door cautiously, fumbling with the unfamiliarity of doing it from this side, and slowly pushed open the door. He got it just wide enough to see one mad glowing eye and the velvet-black tip of a snout before slamming it shut again. 

No more solo hops. When he got to the way station he was letting the ship loose and hitching a ride with the first moron gullible enough to give him one, no matter which way they were going. He didn’t have enough money for his own ship, but he could work on someone else’s and save for a two-seater. Something with a real cargo hold and a real engine room. 

Keeping his knees up against the door, he tried twisting his torso enough to look around. It wouldn’t be easy even if he’d ever stretched in his life; there was no damn room. But he managed to crane his neck far enough to squint into the machinery. The engine had enough lights of its own that he could see, though some of them were so close to his eyes that he almost would rather he couldn’t. There were plenty of humming parts, but nothing he could wrench free without killing himself in the process. It was all made of alloy, anyway. Weren’t ghosts scared of steel? Or was that iron? 

His gaze wandered. There was the coil, and behind it a coolant tank, and – 

The coolant tank was empty. And in the green-yellow light of the engines, he saw a pool of viscous liquid at its base start to roll towards the coil. 

He didn’t know when the coolant tank had cracked. Coolant was thicker and slower than honey; it must have been leaking for hours at a minimum. He was close enough to the way station that that alone wouldn’t be his end. But it had nearly reached the coil, and when the raw coolant screwed with the coil’s conduction – 

_The dog knew,_ Jack thought. And he knew it now, too. The paw on his back, trying to shove him deeper into the engines – the pointed growling, seeming to come from where the trouble had really been all along – 

If Jack had realized when the dog showed him, he’d have had a chance. Five minutes earlier and everything could have been different. But right now, Jack saw his hand reach out in slow motion, and at the same time the coolant dripped right at the base of the coil, and – 

_End._


End file.
